• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.1188-1194
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• 2018

This paper proposes an image enhancement-based license plate detection algorithm to improve the overall performance of system. Non-uniform illumination conditions have huge impact on overall plate detection system accuracy. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for color image enhancement-based license plate detection for improving accuracy of images degraded by excessively strong and low sunlight. Firstly, the image is enhanced by Multi-Scale Retinex algorithm. Secondly, a plate detection method is employed to take advantage of geometric properties of connected components, which can significantly reduce the undesired plate regions. Finally, intersection over union method is applied for detecting the accurate location of number plate. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of plate detection system.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38C no.12
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• pp.1114-1125
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• 2013

License Plate Detection (LPD) is a key component in automatic license plate recognition system. Despite the success of License Plate Recognition (LPR) methods in the past decades, the problem is quite a challenge due to the diversity of plate formats and multiform outdoor illumination conditions during image acquisition. This paper aims at automatical detection of car license plates via image processing techniques. In this paper, we proposed a real-time and robust method for license plate detection using Heuristic Energy Map(HEM). In the vehicle image, the region of license plate contains many components or edges. We obtain the edge energy values of an image by using the box filter and search for the license plate region with high energy values. Using this energy value information or Heuristic Energy Map(HEM), we can easily detect the license plate region from vehicle image with a very high possibilities. The proposed method consists two main steps: Region of Interest (ROI) Detection and License Plate Detection. This method has better performance in speed and accuracy than the most of existing methods used for license plate detection. The proposed method can detect a license plate within 130 milliseconds and its detection rate is 99.2% on a 3.10-GHz Intel Core i3-2100(with 4.00 GB of RAM) personal computer.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.60 no.4
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• pp.667-691
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• 2016

This study focuses on the damage detection of defect types in plate structures based on wavelet transform (WT) and curvelet transform (CT). In particular, for damage detection of structures these transforms have been developed since the last few years. In recent years, the CT approach has been also introduced in an attempt to overcome inherent limitations of traditional multi-scale representations such as wavelets. In this study, the performance of CT is compared with WT in order to demonstrate the capability of WT and CT in detection of defect types in plate structures. To achieve this purpose, the damage detection of defect types through defect shape in rectangular plate is investigated. By using the first mode shape of plate structure and the distribution of the coefficients of the transforms, the damage existence, the defect location and the approximate shape of defect are detected. Moreover, the accuracy and performance generality of the transforms are verified through using experimental modal data of a plate.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.25-32
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• 2015

In this paper, we propose a license plate detection method of running cars in various road images. The proposed method first classifies the road image into day and night images to improve detection accuracy, and then the tail-light regions are detected by finding red color areas in RGB color space. The candidate regions of the license plate areas are detected by using symmetrical property, size, width and variance of the tail-light regions, and to find the license plate areas of the various sizes the morphological operations with adaptive size structuring elements are applied. Finally, the plate area is verified and confirmed with the geometrical and image features of the license plate areas. The proposed method was tested with the various road images and the detection rates (precisions) of 84.2% of day images and 87.4% of night images were achieved.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.1249-1253
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• 2003

License plate recognition is very important in an automobile society. This is because, since plate detection accuracy has large influence on subsequent number recognition, it is very important. However, it is very difficult to do it, because a background and a body color of cars are similar to that of the license plate. In this paper, we propose a new thresholds determination method in the various background by using the real-coded genetic algorithm (RGA). By using RGA, the most likely plate colors are decided under various lighting conditions. First, the average brightness Y values of images are calculated. Next, relationship between the Y value and the most likely plate color thresholds (upper and lower bounds)are obtained by RGA. The relationship between thresholds decided from RGA and brightness average is aproximate by using the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm. In the case of plate detection, thresholds are decided from these functions.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.411-419
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• 2020

In real-world intelligent transportation systems, accuracy in vehicle license plate detection and recognition is considered quite critical. Many algorithms have been proposed for still images, but their accuracy on actual videos is not satisfactory. This stems from several problematic conditions in videos, such as vehicle motion blur, variety in viewpoints, outliers, and the lack of publicly available video datasets. In this study, we focus on these challenges and propose a license plate detection and recognition scheme for videos based on a temporal matching prior network. Specifically, to improve the robustness of detection and recognition accuracy in the presence of motion blur and outliers, forward and bidirectional matching priors between consecutive frames are properly combined with layer structures specifically designed for plate detection. We also built our own video dataset for the deep training of the proposed network. During network training, we perform data augmentation based on image rotation to increase robustness regarding the various viewpoints in videos.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.26 no.9
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• pp.49-55
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• 2021

In this paper, an enhanced 2-stage vehicle license plate detection scheme using object segmentation is proposed to detect accurately the rotated license plates due to the inclined photographing angles in real-road situations. With the previous 3-stage vehicle license plate detection pipeline model, the detection accuracy is likely decreased as the license plates are declined. To resolve this problem, we propose an enhanced 2-stage model by replacing the frontal two processing stages which are for detecting vehicle area and vehicle license plate respectively in only rectangular shapes in the previous 3-stage model with one step to detect vehicle license plate in arbitrarily shapes using object segmentation. According to the comparison results in terms of the detection accuracy of the proposed 2-stage scheme and the previous 3-stage pipeline model against the rotated license plates, the accuracy of the proposed 2-stage scheme is improved by up to about 20% even though the detection process is simplified.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.134-143
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• 2020

Vehicle License Plate Recognition is one of the approaches for transportation and traffic safety networks, such as traffic control, speed limit enforcement and runaway vehicle tracking. Although it has been studied for decades, it is attracting more and more attention due to the recent development of deep learning and improved performance. Also, it is largely divided into license plate detection and recognition. In this study, experiments were conducted to improve license plate detection performance by utilizing various object detection methods and WPOD-Net(Warped Planar Object Detection Network) model. The accuracy was improved by selecting the method of detecting the vehicle(s) and then detecting the license plate(s) instead of the conventional method of detecting the license plate using the object detection model. In particular, the final performance was improved through the process of removing noise existing in the image by using the Fast-SRGAN model, one of the Super-Resolution methods. As a result, this experiment showed the performance has improved an average of 4.34% from 92.38% to 96.72% compared to previous studies.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.251-261
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• 2015

We present a novel method for real-time automatic license plate detection in high-resolution videos. Although there have been extensive studies of license plate detection since the 1970s, the suggested approaches resulting from such studies have difficulties in processing high-resolution imagery in real-time. Herein, we propose a novel cascade structure, the fastest classifier available, by rejecting false positives most efficiently. Furthermore, we train the classifier using the core patterns of various types of license plates, improving both the computation load and the accuracy of license plate detection. To show its superiority, our approach is compared with other state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we collected 20,000 images including license plates from real traffic scenes for comprehensive experiments. The results show that our proposed approach significantly reduces the computational load in comparison to the other state-of-the-art approaches, with comparable performance accuracy.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.100-108
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a method to achieve improved number plate detection for mobile devices by applying a multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) approach. First, we processed supervised CNN-verified car detection and then we applied the detected car regions to the next supervised CNN-verifier for number plate detection. In the final step, the detected number plate regions were verified through optical character recognition by another CNN-verifier. Since mobile devices are limited in computation power, we are proposing a fast method to recognize number plates. We expect for it to be used in the field of intelligent transportation systems.